"Hey, Shintaro, you know, if you fold 1000 paper cranes, you get a wish."

When he looked up, her hazel eyes were already long gone, blurred over, and the 100 on his desk folded in and out and creased in her fingers. It was thin and the paper wings fluttered in the breeze from the open window.

Delicate was the word, and he let her tilt it into his hand. "Keep it," her pink lips turned into a conspiratorial smile, as if she were sharing some kind of secret, and she held a finger to her lips.

"This is our secret."

…

He couldn't bring himself to crush it, even when he looked down from the metal lining crisscrossing and entwining together like the lines of the folds on the crane, the thin 100 on the very edge.

The wind was strong when she had fallen down, he thought, sitting behind the fencing, and he slipped his fingers through the fence and let the 100 of the wing perch there, looking below.

They had done a good job of cleaning up, it seemed, because even as he looked down, from the window next to the classroom, from the window of his red eyes, from the window of the roof, there had not been a trace of red, not in her eyes, not in her scarf, not in the warmth of her cheeks. The flowers on her desk, too, were blank, and the petals had fallen the moment the vase had touched the top.

The wings did not stir, not once, since they had left that girl's hand, and he thought he could understand why.

"This is our secret."

What secret? What had she kept from him? What had she left him?

The crane's 100 whipped back and forth, as if the red wanted to separate itself from the memory that was Shintaro's test score.

There was something wrong with her smile, he thought, and he watched the crane tilt back and forth, the 100 flickering on the cement of the roof.

"Keep it." Her eyes had lost their luster lately, they seemed almost red when it slipped into his hand, but when he had looked up, all he could see was the red of her scarf, the brown of her hair, the pale flowers on her desk.

The wind tugged at the 100, coaxing it forward, and Shintaro, in a moment of madness, almost considered reaching through and pushing it. The red of that 100 was almost like the blood red of her scarf when she fell.

Had her scarf been red?

All he could think of was the white petals already falling apart onto the empty desk and the desperation of his hand when he had cradled the crane in his hands, and even then, the wings would not move for him, not move for anyone again.

…

Delicate was the word, he thought, and he watched it from his bed, the folds creased and dirtied in his haste to save the slip of 100 on his shelf, far, far away from the edge. 'You fool,' he scolded himself. 'What are you trying to prove? She's not here.'

She's not here. The red of the 100 was almost painful. It had been perfect, all the folds had been perfect, and he wanted to push it off the edge. It had been perfect and he let it crumble and stand on the roof and he had wanted to push it.

The wing was all he could see, but that was all he needed. He stood up and tugged it down.

All he needed was 1000. Was she trying to say something? he thought as he pulled out papers by the handfuls, the crumpled sheets falling uselessly to the unlit floor. He tore through the drawers, and he threw out everything that resembled a test, everything that he had during that time they had together, those useless, those happy, those carefree, those untouchable summer days.

Her smile, the touch of her hand, the warmth of her scarf on that winter day—none of it was left in the 100s that fell around him, that fell like her-

100s fluttered and collected around the careful folds of Ayano's fingers, and not one touched even the wings of that red 100.

Was it not enough?

He wasn't enough.

Nothing had been enough.

He lay, crumpled, among the papers, huffing and puffing from a year of no effort, and it was then that he began to cry.

His computer had a new update.

…

It wasn't enough.

He threw the ruined crane against the window, and all he could see through his red eyes was the view from below the day after and how tall the building was, how crimson of her scarf must have looked, fluttering when she fell.

The folds fell apart in his hands, the wings would not wait for him, they would leave as if they didn't want to exist for him.

He had already run out of red 100s to save him.

He was still at one.

The one 100 that served him no purpose other than to remind him he couldn't create it, he couldn't create Ayano—his hand swung up and the shelf crashed to the floor, and the wings still would not move even as it fell, even though it was at the very back, and it was the first to fall. The next one to fall was a girl with a headphone print on her hoodie, then a raven headed boy in a green coverall, and the girl with the cream colored hair began to scream—

The first book fell on the wing, and then the head was crushed before the pages blended all together and both the red 100 and the miserable blank white of the paper were gone.

He watched the papers flutter downwards, the swaying of the fallen shelf, the crushed 100.

Gone.

He stood up, slowly, and took big black scissors and snipped the numbers off—1, 0, 0, all useless on their own, with no meaning, and he cut it into little pieces until the red was no more and all that was left was the miserable blanks of his memories.

The wings were gone, the red of his neighbor's scarf was gone, the warmth of that summer red was gone. The scissors were smooth, cold in his hand. No red at all, he thought, dimly, thoughtlessly, and he let the cool silver open and close in between his hands.

'No red,' the bed creaked and he laid his head against the pillow, closing his eyes.

The metal was cool against his neck, and it blew away the colors of the 100 on the rooftop, the warmth of her hand in that summer heat.

No more red.

He plunged it downwards.

A/N: eh well this felt kinda half-baked since I can't really write good stories past 5 or so, but you know how it is with Shintaro and his scissor angst we always need more of that in our lives amirite